


A day is long and I will be waiting for you

by lilith_morgana



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 08:35:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8884036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilith_morgana/pseuds/lilith_morgana
Summary: He chooses them well, there is no doubt about that, creates lifelong fighters from a handful of clay.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Fic salvaged from 2006. Back when I wrote about tv-shows instead of games.

She dreams violently that month, almost as if her body knows before her and prepares. Dreams of the catacombs in Paris where she runs from a Dalek and always stumbles, dreams of weddings and births that never happened, a quick and not serious kiss that did, dreams of meteor rains far away on a planet where they got stuck for days.   
  
She dreams and wakes, hands clutching her own body as if reassuring herself it's still strong enough, ready not to betray her. And it is. Dealing with a thousand disjointed lines and seams already, a daily sort of alchemy.   
  
No, she never forgot.   
  
  
\--  
  
  
When she realises it's _the Doctor_ , she sees that he's unchanged but every bit is altered. A couple of details – a smile, a question, the crumpled paper bag of jellybabies pressed into her palm when he thought she needed it and often when he didn't - detached and lingering between them, but it's never really the same.   
  
He is bits and patches of _her_ Doctor, when she talks to him. This put-on gentleness ( _I didn't have a choice, Sarah, I couldn't take you with me_ ) she has never quite believed in since those days when he was a man who covered his good hearts in ruffled shirts and a benevolent dignity; that overwhelming grin fluttering around in his face as she has to buy the chips, rolls her eyes and wonders if he hasn't worked out the logical mechanisms behind a monetary system yet.   
  
At the table while they're eating, he tells her that they've met again, once. Sarah doesn't remember.   
  
"Old age," she jokes, suddenly feeling very fragile.   
  
"No," the Doctor says softly. "In fact, I would be surprised if anybody remembers that time. It was a most unusual paradox in time, created by strong powers – I for one, was split in five."  
  
"Oh." Sarah laughs and can see Rose glare at them from her table a bit further away. "I suppose I was happy to see all of you?"  
  
He grins. "Of course you were! I happen to recall that I saved your life as usual."  
  
Later, in the dark with no pretenses left to maintain, he tells her in very few words about his people and the War, his travels and his ghosts and when she asks, he speaks of his new companion. (A harsh voice: "She destroyed the Daleks. Their _race_.") Sarah learned a lot about the Doctor's entourage over the years, could meet a crowd and know after a few minutes which ones he would want inside the TARDIS. She could watch the bold and brave ones, the fearless idealists and their hunger, the good-natured cynics and the unbroken fighters – taut stubbornness, a capacity for the extraordinary, every single one of them mirroring something he likes to be reminded of in his own personality or something that he thinks he lacks – and know.   
  
"You've always been what they would call pathologically egocentric," Sarah said to him once, and made him smile. She doesn't remember what he replied, possibly that he was a genius from the far future and could afford it.   
  
"And now she's too much like you and you can't stand it," Sarah says to him in the dark, and makes his lips curl in an unfamiliar gesture of pain.   
  
It's a strange thing to say, but he doesn't answer so she knows she's right.   
  
Before they part, a slow hesitant sort of parting the way she used to pretend it, Sarah puts her hands around his face. If it's because of what he's told her or because she could be this man's mother she doesn't know. It can't matter. Her thumbs brush gently over his skin, fingers following his new lines without words.   
  
When he tips his head and kisses her goodnight, she pretends, too, that this is something they used to do.   
  
  
\--  
  
  
The light is dull and grey, the shadows tall. For a spring evening, Sarah notes, it's not very warm. Above them the sky is flaring pink and yellow; Sarah is uncertain of her motives, but she tells Rose that it's because of pollutions in the atmosphere. All the prettiest colours caused by human stupidity. Rose nods.   
  
"The Doctor told me when we visited North America in the future – the fog was so thick and red you thought you were walking in some weird cartoon cloud. And of course most people were dead, but hey – the undertakers had a golden era."  
  
Sarah smiles. He chooses them well, there is no doubt about that, creates lifelong fighters from a handful of clay. _God-maker_ , she thinks, remembering the Doctor's eyes as he listened to temptation.   
  
Rose in this light, her face shaded but still branded with that insatiable wanderlust, impossible without him but nonetheless _there_ , like a part of her now. He will never understand. It's impossible to blame the girl for that.   
  
And it's such a small move, to just slide over the limits and markings and open up for someone else. Sarah tries. She presses Rose against her, breathes sweet perfume and hairspray. _Be careful_ , she wants to say, but doesn't.   
  
  
\--  
  
  
"My Sarah Jane," the Doctor says when he leaves and places a kiss on her cheek, lifts her up like she's much younger and light as a feather; then softer and into her hair: "I wouldn't have missed you for the _world_."  
  
She watches the empty space, the pattern of loneliness, after the TARDIS has left the park and believes him. She wonders if she will sleep better or worse.   
  
  
  


**

  
  
  
  
And then: far away and in another life, Rose comes to visit her and stays for the entire weekend. That's the first time. The second time she brings a purple rucksack that looks entirely too childish for someone who hasn't been to school for years, puts it on the floor and nearly cries.   
  
They never mention it.   
  
Sarah makes breakfasts, lunches, suppers – momentarily worried the enthusiasm she pours into cooking for someone else again will scare her away, but not concerned enough to stop - one hand remaining on the girl's shoulder a moment too long, as if to read her. But she doesn't have to.   
  
She knows what this is about.   
  
It's about the summer wearing them down, through heat and thunder; it's about the fact that she's started remembering: images and words and dusty planets east of the Milky Way two space corridors left and a feeling that never became small enough to earn itself a name.  
  
It's the nightmares, the unsettled desires, the men she followed home when she was drunk and pretended with; it's about the man she followed home when she was sober and left before he woke up regretting nothing but the fact that she maybe, possibly, called him by the wrong name or saw someone else in his eyes.   
  
Sarah knows.   
  
Sarah got engaged to the first man she went out with after returning; Leonard, a science teacher from Hereford. It was the closest she could get. Her family adored him. It's impossible to know if they would have been happy together, she thinks, comforting herself even now. He would have done everything for her ( _altered the universe_ , she used to think and close her eyes when he kissed her) and like a character in a bad soap opera, she betrayed him with his friend and watched him cry for an hour as he packed his things. He left his favourite Stones albums, she never told him or gave them back.   
  
After too many glasses of wine, sometimes, she plays them ( _have you seen your mother, baby, standing in the shadow?_ ) still wishing they had met when she was older and more forgiving.  
  
When she tells Rose, the girl laughs, a calm liberated expression in her eyes as if she hadn't expected – Sarah laughs with her after a little while.  
  
Other days they have wine and bread and cheese in the suffocating heat and last out until the sun has set. They remain outside, watching the sky. They know the names for all the star constellations and what hides behind them, but neither of them speaks about that. In fact, they don't speak a lot for a very long time.   
  
"I just don't _know_ ," Rose tells Sarah outside a dirty pub toilet when they go out for more drinks afterwards.   
  
Sarah presses fingertips to the dry, sinewy lines of wood on the walls and nods.   
  
"That's allowed," she says, stupidly.   
  
  
\--  
  
  
The sky is heavy with rain and September darkness and their clothes stick to their skin when they walk home. A full summer, and they haven't learned any important lessons yet.   
  
"It hurts." Rose is breathless, drunk, still holding on to shapes of the unconquerable hope: _he will return, I can go back._   
  
"Yes." Sarah puts her coat over Rose's shoulders.   
  
And it rains, finally. When Rose turns her face to meet Sarah's gaze she has mascara over her cheeks so it looks like she's crying. Sarah wipes it away, slowly, thinking she can't tell the difference but that it ought to be rain.   
  
Rain pouring down like dot-to-dot maps, like judgement over all the places she has secretly thought of but never touched before; marking the contours of a desire as strange as the two of them, the water that dissolves all the syllables of words long forced back into the unsaid. From underneath the coat, Rose's hand comes up to rest on Sarah's waist. A palm's worth of questions and permissions. Sarah stops walking.   
  
Rose has a burning in her blood, a glint in her eyes, when she _reaches_ (almost as if she's been waiting, too) and Sarah finds that her lips part without too much of a conscience.   
  
"Oh," she says.   
  
"Yeah," Rose replies, shy for once.   
  
And somehow that is all they say about it.   
  
All they say in the privacy of Sarah's house, up against the wall where Rose's hair entangles with a framed photograph and the shoes come off in soft thuds on the carpet; shaking a little, fingers shivery and numb from the cold as Sarah runs them over the girl's neck wondering for second if they're making it worse. All they say about the wet clothes that don't come off, the jumper getting stuck around Rose's wrist – Sarah puts her tongue to it later, dragging the scent of rain into her own mouth. The jeans turned inside-out and dropped in a pile over Sarah's coat.   
  
About the hands cupping and stroking over Rose's back and shoulders, hands different in the living room and the bedroom, tearing but hesitating. Hands under clothes, questioning at first, more determined as Rose nods a wide-eyed approval. (God she's _young_ but then she leans in a whispers something that makes Sarah blush and she forgets.)  
  
And Sarah kisses her and begins a new form of mark; this cartography over travels that never can happen but maybe, possibly it _isn't_ unbearable.   
  
  
\--  
  
  
Rose still sleeps when Sarah wakes up in a room wrapped in sun-white light and sharp morning angles. She still smells of rain, her hair rough and not quite dry against Sarah's face.   
  
In the imitation of being loved, thoroughly, by someone who would curl around her body and stay, Sarah folds her arms around the other woman as softly as she can. Rose grunts in her sleep, the hard line of her spine softening against Sarah's chest.   
  
And just then, _there_ every other outcome is suddenly impossible.


End file.
